Wagner's name comes up only occasionally these days,
and usually in connection with his early studies on dinosaurs, pterosaurs,
and ancestral birds. There has also been some work done recently in
German on his conservative religious orientation, and how this might
have affected his paleontologic views. Wagner's interests extended to
geographical distribution, and his three-part monograph published in
1844-1846 represents an early effort to understand ecogeographically
how faunal similarities between the Old and New World might be accounted
for by their climatic similarities, especially at high latitudes.

Life Chronology

--born in Nürnberg, Germany, on 21 March 1797.
--1826: receives his doctorate
--1829: appointed lecturer at the University of Erlangen
--1832: made lecturer of zoology and assistant at the Zoologische Staatssammlung,
University of Munich
--1836: advanced to full professor at the University of Munich
--1843: made the first ordinary professor of paleontology at the University
of Munich
--1844-1846: publishes "Die
Geographische Verbreitung der Säugethiere Dargestellt" in three
parts in Abhandlungen, Bayerische Akademie der Wissenschaften, Philosophisch-Historische
Klasse--1845: publishes his Geschichte
der Urwelt
--1849: made curator at the Zoologische Staatssammlung
--1853-1861: curator of the paleontological collection, Zoologische Staatssammlung
--1855: made a corresponding member of the Russian Academy of Sciences
--1861: publishes a brief account of a specimen of Archaeopteryx
--1861: publishes a brief description of a species of the dinosaur genus
Compsognathus
--dies at Munich, Germany, on 17 December 1861.